FSU professor emerita pens New England story

By Elizabeth Pimentel, Correspondent

Saturday

Jul 28, 2018 at 4:00 AMAug 2, 2018 at 9:49 AM

“My mother is leaving home for the first time in her eighty years of life.” From this opening line you know that Catherine McLaughlin’s searing debut novel Blue Collars is about resilient personalities with strong ties to family and locale.

Fiona “Finn” Kilroy, the narrator raised in an Irish-Catholic family, comes of age in New Bedford, Massachusetts during the 60s. Unlike her mother, who grew up in an era when it was rare for working-class women to travel out of their surroundings, Finn lives through a time of social upheaval and changing norms.

Having previously published a collection of poetry, “Under a Circus Moon,” McLaughlin, a professor emerita at Framingham State University, has now created a powerful work of fiction. The narrator describes her extended family, their working-class neighborhood, and the town where she was raised with such intimacy and clarity that it’s hard to believe this isn’t a memoir. Like the fishermen from this seaport town where she grew up, the author reels you in.

Although McLaughlin and I have never met, I know her world. Finn could have been my next-door neighbor, so vividly are the characters portrayed, and so accurate is the depiction of events and the description of the South End where, as contemporaries, we both spent our childhood.

My mind teemed with memories of years spent under the stern tutelage of the sisters at St. Mary’s School. I shivered recalling how I, too, learned the backstroke at Municipal Beach swim classes, held rain or shine. Once, while walking along the top of the waterfront’s imposing hurricane dike, I dropped my key chain into one of the crevasses and finally retrieved it by fashioning a hook and line from a bobby pin and string. I relived trips to Gulf Hill for the tastiest ice cream ever, Saturday afternoon double features at the cinema on Water Street, bustling with activity, and hours spent at the library where Finn and I both lost ourselves in books.

The author’s lyrical prose details the heart-warming, yet dark, disturbing life of Finn, a little girl residing in one of New Bedford’s ubiquitous three-story tenements where both her grandparents and aunt and uncle’s family also lived. She is the daughter of a hard-working and hard-drinking textile mill loomfixer and a loving, yet naïve mother. Religion plays a big part in Finn’s daily life. “…all come in now for the Rosary!” her mother would call out of the second-story window to her five children playing outside.

But beneath the veneer of a strong Catholic family lies a house divided. Finn’s mother is constantly at odds with her alcoholic husband. “Do you have to come home drunk every night?” she laments, while he responds, “I’m not drunk. Lay off me.”

Finn tells of her father’s eventual unemployment, her clandestine friendship with an African-American girl, and her close bond to her adored older sister, Molly.

Against the backdrop of the demise of the Berkshire Hathaway mill, the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War, a secret unfolds and gnaws at Finn throughout her childhood and adolescence — one she fears would tear apart her tight-knit family.

Like the dike shielding the harbor and factories of this New England city, Finn builds a wall of silence to protect her loved ones. But the specter of guilt and shame has left its imprint.

McLaughlin captures the full array of emotion as Finn’s girlhood progresses. On one page she plays blissfully at the beach with her father and siblings, on another she is shaken by the death of her best friend’s brother.

The author’s creative strength is getting into a troubled child’s mind, uncovering the humiliation, self-loathing and self-blame, and explaining it with deep self-reflection, the way a young girl would. She reaches back to the past and relates it to the present, as when Finn recalls her father. “He was a humble man, and I’ve often wondered if he ever felt appreciated, or if he felt like the lonely breadwinner on the outskirts of his family’s life, unthought of as we slept in our beds.”

The characters are our neighbors in a stunningly portrayed mill city in the midst of economic depression and changing values.

McLaughlin was mentored as a graduate student by James Baldwin. The influence of his book, “The Fire Next Time,” is evident in her raw portrayal of racism on a national, community and personal level. Furthermore, like Baldwin, she seamlessly interweaves her poems into the novel. In the chapter titled “Origins of Shame,” she begins with a verse: “…Children hide in the hollows eating stolen apples poisoned with their shame.”

Finn’s setbacks and disappointments serve as catalysts toward self-discovery. She begins as a fearful little girl dealing with her anxiety by ritualistically tearing at the plaster wall behind her bed. Yet she evolves into a teenager who defies the racism and hypocrisy of her family, a graduate student who finds romance while living abroad, a mother and writer.

This is a story of survival. But it is also a love story to a girl’s family. As Finn recounts, “The connections among three generations had been forged in that tenement and our love for each other. The threads of our individual lives, while occasionally strained, were drawn from this family and this neighborhood, woven together like the fabric of the mills, the whole cloth durable and of an intricate, colorful, and comforting design.”